


In Your Most Frail Gesture

by englishable



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-22
Updated: 2015-06-22
Packaged: 2018-04-05 13:49:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,334
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4182168
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/englishable/pseuds/englishable
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Natasha tells him that the lullaby worked better than ever, it may also be an assessment of her own private thoughts and revelations in the moment: not like she's open to sharing them all, just yet, but they'll get there. Or at least she hopes they will.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Your Most Frail Gesture

**Author's Note:**

> I was asked to explain when I first started shipping these two, and it became a sort of narrative rendering of the opening scene in AOU. I usually require some cataclysmic “AH-HA” moment to really get invested in a ship – the exact moment at which my brain goes soaring into the sun before being smote for its hubris – and that was it.
> 
> Comments and critiques are always welcome!

…

_“Hey, Big Guy. Sun’s gettin’ real low.”_

…

On occasion, Natasha will still be surprised by how solid his hand feels.

Because when he offers it out to her, when he lays it down to rest over her own, she half-expects them to pass right through one another. Like a ghost, she thinks, or rather like a ghost and a living person attempting to touch – Natasha, of course, being the ghost in this particular analogy.  

But no, there they both are, bone and tendon and muscle, although she always pauses for a moment just to make sure.

Smoke from a burning armored vehicle floats around them. Ash drifts down like snow. A final few shots are heard from Strucker’s base, somewhere far behind them. 

She feels and sees none of it.

( _“No,”_ Bruce had said, when she first proposed the idea.  _“No. Nat, are you crazy? He’ll break your arm.”_ )

While teaching her about codes and ciphers, methods of secretive and silent communication, Natasha’s earliest instructors had emphasized the symbolic power of hands. 

Between conspirators, the slightest casual gesture may mean a hundred things at once. Hands are traditionally used to confer blessing and plead mercy, to transfer guilt and swear oaths. At the beginning of life, a child’s hands will emerge before its eyes and mouth have finished forming. Burial customs from both the ancient and modern worlds pay careful attention to how hands are arranged, folded across the chest or laid down against the sides or clutched around a coin meant to pay some final fare. It is also considered prudent to burn off the fingerprints of those whom you have killed, those whose identities you wish to remain unknown.

Hands precede language, that’s how they had explained it. Hands form a language in and of themselves.

Depictions of an opened hand are more ambiguous, Natasha recalls, meant to signify either a falling blow or the thing that will stop it. Context must be considered.

( _“Nah, I don’t think he will.”_  She’d rolled up her sleeves to the elbow. She hadn’t been surprised by his reaction; the use of a de-escalation process at all had already taken significant persuasion.  _“But here, I’ll show you what I’ve got in mind and then let you decide.”_ )

And in everything she has since learned about psychological grounding techniques, touch is always mentioned. As it should be: what better way to come back down into your body again than to be reminded of the fact that you have one? Announce your footsteps as they are taken, trace out the letters of your name, make a fist and release it.

_(“What, does your plan involve arm wrestling?”_  Bruce had rolled up his sleeves as well, in mimicry, and he’d had on the beginnings of a smile.  _“Or do you think he’d like rock-paper-scissors better? And don’t ask me about the ‘paper beats rock’ thing again, I’m still developing a hypothesis.”_ )

A growl rolls through the Other Guy’s chest as he waits to see what will happen. 

Natasha feels the breath go out of her, watches it turn white in the cold, hard air, and reaches forward to trail a hand lightly down his arm.

He stares at her and does not look away. 

His skin has a worn, former texture to it, the surface of a stone whose shape has been smoothed and changed by the constant passage of water. She follows the ridge-line of a vein along his bared wrist, warm with the blood pulsing through it. 

There are certain people, Natasha knows, who would have things be otherwise. 

They would pull him apart like a flock of crows, drain that blood into labeled glass vials and inject his brain with colorful dyes so that its sections may be more easily viewed under light: amygdala, hippocampus, thalamus, basal ganglia. The adrenal glands and other objects of interest would be cryopreserved. 

They imagine, mistakenly, that there is something to excise and weigh and biopsy, as though his second self is a tumor to be cut out.

_(“Sometimes I wonder. When – if, I guess, if I die, I wonder what would happen. If I go and the Other Guy stays, I mean, so that he’d be all that was left.”_  Bruce had been looking off at some distant point as he spoke.  _“At least the dissection could be educational. I might finally get a freshman student to identify the reticular activating system correctly.”)_

What about the rest of him? They’d likely cremate it, returning his body to its irreducible elements of carbon and hydrogen and oxygen – this is how monsters are defeated in the old childhood stories, another sort of burial custom. There must be the ritual scattering of ashes at a crossroads, an assurance that the pieces cannot find their way back to each other.

(He’d tried to save them all that trouble and do the job himself, once, and failed, although that’s a context-dependent term as well. 

But then he had discarded the flattened bullet, left it behind, and years later there had been young girl in Kolkata whose eyes brightened with understanding as Natasha asked her, “ _Can you find the doctor for me? The American? Ah…daẏālu c _ikitsaka_?”)_

She passes over his palm, broad and flat with a deep, distinctive line through its center. She moves up the curve of his fingers, half-curled as if they are cradling something fragile. 

He keeps very still the whole time. 

And here is what her hand could be read as saying, now, if it were possible or necessary to translate:

_You are safe. You are protected. You are alive. You are singular and you are complete and you are yourself. You are here, and so am I._

A corner of his mouth twitches. A shiver ripples through his body.  

She stops, but does not draw back.

_(You are loved, you are loved, you are loved.)_

Then his muscles spasm, and the Other Guy – Bruce, he’s always Bruce, underneath, that’s why there will be nothing for them to take out whole in the end –  stumbles away, catches at a branch and stops himself from falling. 

Another breath escapes her, one she hadn’t realized she was holding. She listens to his quieting footfalls.

The idea should be frightening, Natasha knows.

The idea should pass through her like a hammered-home nail, fix her into place: which it occasionally has, before now. Such things have never been meant for her. She wasn’t made for them. 

(She isn’t really supposed to exist at all, in some senses of the word.) 

Natasha looks at her hand again, the same one he has just allowed to travel down along that warm vein and over those fingers with their circling, tree-ring prints. 

(Don’t hands have something to do with chances and gambles, too? Playing a hand, revealing a hand, putting something of relative importance – an unfolding disaster, a life – into someone else’s hands, taking those same things back into your own, or all that business about crossing your fingers for luck when you are on the threshold of an irreversible choice. 

Fingers crossed, that’s the expression. Fingers crossed.)

Then Natasha slips the left glove back on, feels it tighten over her knuckles, and follows him through the trees. 

He’s already on his feet when she finds him, shaking dead leaves and ashes from his hair. A single line of bright green creeps down the prominent vein in his neck before disappearing.

“Oh, good.” She tosses a shirt to him, and Bruce elbows his way into it. “There you are. I was hoping you wouldn’t go too far.”

“I never do.” One hand raises to fix his disheveled hair, but she smiles at him just then and so he stops. “Everything all clear?”

“Yeah,“ she answers, without pause. “All clear.”

…

_“somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond_  
_any experience, your eyes have their silence:_  
_in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,  
_ _or which i cannot touch because they are too near.”_

_-_   _e.e cummings_


End file.
